


Who Will Serve

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: F/M, spoilers through season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:26:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: “Should we--do something? Celebrate?” Philip asks. He keeps his eyes on his newspaper, feigning disinterest. “The first year is the hardest, that’s what they told us.”“They never told me that,” she says, puzzled.





	Who Will Serve

_1966_

On August 13th she comes home late. The sunset makes the tiny kitchen in their city apartment glow orange. Philip sits at the table, reading the newspaper and finishing up a bowl of Brunswick stew. A small pan of cornbread sits cooling on the countertop, one corner piece missing, jagged edges left behind. 

“Was getting hungry,” he says through a mouthful of cornbread, but she waves a dismissive hand. 

“It’s okay.” She doesn’t have much of an appetite anyway. 

Her target at the DOJ had gotten a little handsy over happy hour drinks and she’d let him take it further than she wanted to. Her stomach had turned sharply when he pulled her ponytail, partly because she didn’t like it and partly because she was afraid he’d pull her wig off. 

“How was happy hour?” Philip asks. 

Elizabeth rubs at her temple, a headache forming that threatens to worsen her evening. “They’re housing the jurors at a Sheraton two miles from the courthouse. Shuttle service leaves the hotel at 8:35, arrives at the courthouse at 8:50.”

“And in the evenings?”

“Leaves the courthouse at 5:15, they’re back around 5:30, depending on traffic.”

“That’s plenty of time.”

“Good,” Elizabeth says with a nod. “I was thinking we’d aim for Thursday, they’ll be more tired, run down.”

Philip shrugs. “Whatever you think is best.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. It annoys her when he just agrees, when he won’t make a decision. He’s all too happy to follow along. She picks up her purse and heads to the bedroom but he calls after her.

“Uh, it’s a year,” he says. “We arrived in Washington a year ago today.”

“Oh,” she hears herself say. “Has it really been that long?” 

“Should we--do something? Celebrate?” Philip asks. He keeps his eyes on his newspaper, feigning disinterest. “The first year is the hardest, that’s what they told us.”

“They never told me that,” she says, puzzled. Her headache throbs between her eyes. 

“Just a thought,” Philip says. He finishes the last of his stew, sopping up what remains with a mealy piece of cornbread. She watches him, the perfect American, as far as anyone can tell. He’d adapted quickly when they’d arrived a year ago, picking up on cultural norms much faster than she had. It irritates her, when she knows she’s much more suited for this than he, much more skilled; it irritates her that he should fit in so easily and that she should struggle to keep up small talk in line at the convenience store, should wrestle with herself over the pair of pants that costs ten dollars more, even though it looks exactly the same. 

Meeting with contacts, working targets, that is what she is here to do, where she feels comfortable, where she excels. It’s when she comes home every night that her skin crawls, that she feels suffocated, that she has to push her palms against her eye sockets until she sees stars in order to keep from screaming. In time, she’d come to care for him, and he for her, Zhukov told her. But she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to need anybody. 

“Everything okay?” Philip asks. 

Elizabeth clears her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m just--long day. I need to lie down.”

She goes into the bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, bites her tongue. Grips her knees tightly and tries not to cry. Behind her eyelids, her senses are heightened; her blood thrums loud in her ears, the scratching in the hallway sounds like it’s right beside her, the clatter of Philip doing the dishes sounds like a landslide. She breathes unevenly and tries to remember Smolensk in the springtime, walking to and from lessons with her friend Katya, jumping over the puddles of melting snow, knowing her mother would have extra chores for her if she came home with wet stockings again. She tries to remember the creak of the train, the squeal of metal against metal. 

Her head snaps up at a noise in the hallway. A ragged, persistent scratching. She moves quietly into the kitchen, silencing Philip with a palm on his back and a pointed look. She puts a hand on her gun, still strapped to her thigh, and moves toward the front door, Philip at her shoulder. One hand tightens along her gun while the other slowly turns the doorknob. Elizabeth throws it open to reveal a black and white cat, scratching at the doorframe. It looks up at them with golden green eyes and mews. 

“Oh for god’s sake,” she snaps, and slams the door shut. 

Later that night the scratching wakes her, so she blearily walks to the kitchen, pours a puddle of milk into a saucer, and places it outside the door. She wakes up early the next morning before Philip to bring it in from the hall. Two nights later, she puts out trimmings from the chicken they’d had for dinner, and then she doesn’t see the cat again for a long time. 

______________________________________________

She wakes one morning in September to find Philip already gone. The center has him running something down in Richmond so he’s been up early lately. Elizabeth rolls to the center of the bed, her face landing on Philip’s pillow. She smells it without really meaning to, and suddenly she wishes she’d told him goodbye this morning. 

Three months or so after they’d arrived in America, she’d been crawling out of her skin and they’d consummated their supposed marriage on a morning like this one: overcast, with the sun slipping in and out of the clouds. It was brief but gentle, nothing like her targets. She’d looked down mostly, or shut her eyes in a gesture of half-pretend bliss, but once, with her hands on his shoulders for purchase, she met his eyes and it sent a jolt through her body. Something startling and real that made her come unexpectedly, shaking with a hand over her mouth.

She remembers it now, with her face in his pillow, and her hand drifts down between her legs. 

______________________________________________

“I recruited someone,” she says finally, no longer able to contain her pride or excitement. 

Philip looks up from his book, eyebrows high. “Really? That’s--congratulations.”

Her pointer finger frets nervously along the pages of her own book, energy coursing through her body. It had been such a rush, to tell someone the truth. Especially Gregory. She’s grown to trust him so much over the past six months. He’s easy to talk to, much more so than Philip. “Thank you,” she says, unable to contain her smile. 

“That guy in Chicago, right?” Philip asks. 

She nods. “I’ll be going back in a few weeks, maybe sooner if the Centre thinks it’s necessary.”

“I saw that cat again today,” Philip says. “The black and white one.”

“I hope you sent it away. If we keep feeding it, it’ll keep coming back.”

Philip opens his mouth, closes it again. “I set out the leftovers on a plate by the door.”

Elizabeth gives an exasperated sigh. “Philip I told you not to--”

“Well you said you wouldn’t be back until the morning, and I didn’t want it to go bad--”

“So you put it in the refrigerator--”

“He was hungry,” Philip snaps. “He needed something, and he wasn’t getting it, so I gave it to him. Sometimes it’s the… right thing to do.”

Elizabeth blinks several times. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He is embarrassed suddenly, whether he’d meant to accuse her or not. “Nothing--just. Forget it.”

“If you--”

“I’m sorry, alright? I shouldn’t have--you don’t--Elizabeth, you don’t owe me anything. You know that, right?”

“Do you?” She tosses her book on the floor and turns off her bedside lamp. 

______________________________________________

Walking through Chicago in December is the closest she’s felt to home in a year and a half and she can’t take the giddy smile off her face. 

“Why you smiling like that?” Gregory teases, kind eyes looking her up and down. 

Elizabeth stuffs her hands in her pockets and buries her nose in her scarf. “No reason.”

It’s only another block or so to Gregory’s apartment and they make the walk in silence. Once inside, he takes her coat, hangs it up in the hall, and goes into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on. 

“I’ll be in the bedroom,” she calls down the hallway, her voice low. 

“I know you will,” he says back, and she grins. 

This is the first time she’s done this, and she knows that once she does it, nothing will be the same between her and Gregory. She sits down on the bed, takes a breath, and begins to pull the bobby pins out of her wig, starting at her crown and working down to the base of her skull. The auburn wig comes off easily after that, falling softly beside her on the bed after a slight tug. She hasn’t started undoing her pincurls yet when Gregory comes in with two cups of coffee and stops short in the doorway. 

“Oh, shit. Elizabeth,” he says. 

“You know my name, who I am. What I do. So I figured you should know what I look like too,” she explains, then suddenly feels more vulnerable than she ever has with him. “I still have to take the curls out--”

“You’re beautiful,” Gregory says. He puts the coffee on the dresser in the corner and sits beside her on the bed. 

“Can I...” He reaches up and she nods. Deliberate and focused, like he is in all things, he removes the bobby pin holding her bangs in a tight curl against her scalp. They unwind and flop onto her forehead, pointing the wrong way. Gregory brushes them to the side. 

“I knew you weren’t a real redhead but I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting this,” he jokes. 

Elizabeth smiles and kisses him, and lets her legs spread wide when he lays her down on the mattress.

Late that afternoon, when the sky grows dark, it’s hard to pull herself from the bed, to tear away from Gregory’s hands on her hip bones, his kisses along her jaw. 

“I can drive you to the airport,” he says as she tries to extricate herself from his grip and pull her sweater over her head. 

“No, it’s okay. I’ll take a cab.” She stands, legs still wobbly, and picks her skirt from the floor. “I think I can make it back up here in February, maybe March.”

“Not before?” Gregory asks behind her. 

She sighs. “No.”

“They used to have you coming up here every three weeks like clockwork. What gives?”

“Gregory, you know I don’t have control over things like that. Now that you’re a developed agent they don’t need me checking on you all the time. The relationship’s been established.”

“That’s one way to put it,” he says, reaching for her ass and giving it a squeeze.

She jumps, annoyed now. “I can’t just come up here when I feel like it. And even if I could--I--I wouldn’t want to. It would--complicate things.” God, what a stupid idea this was. This was exactly what they’d warned her about in training, getting too close, too attached. 

“You keep saying things are so complicated with you, but you’re the simplest person I’ve ever met,” Gregory says. “You’re--everything is what it is with you. You’re not difficult.”

Elizabeth smiles sadly. “I know someone in Washington who’d disagree with you.”

“So why are you going back?”

Her cheeks get hot and she snaps, “It’s my job. My cover. And I thought--I thought you understood that. I thought you were--like me.” She grabs her boots and hurries into the living room to put them on. 

Gregory follows her, stepping into his boxers as he comes down the hall. “Elizabeth, listen.”

“I’ll see you in March, okay?” She zips her boot and stands, hands crossed over her chest. 

“I know it’s your job,” Gregory says, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I know you have to go back. But you’re a force to be reckoned with, Elizabeth. And I just hope he knows how to handle that.”

She smiles sadly. “He doesn’t need to. I can handle myself.”

______________________________________________

_1967_  
His broad hands span her waist, pulling her closer to the edge of the bed. A baby will be good, she thinks, something positive amidst all this chaos. A brand new human being with so much potential, who they can raise with good values, bring up with common sense and resourcefulness. She hopes it’s a girl. She hasn’t any idea what she’d do with a son. 

“You okay? Should I stop?” Philip asks, his lips hovering over her bellybutton.

“No, it’s fine. I was just thinking about--a daughter. A girl.”

His brow puckers ever so slightly but his mouth stays frozen in a smile of wonderment. “Not a boy?”

“I wouldn’t know what to make of a boy,” Elizabeth says, reaching behind and unclasping her bra. “It was just me and my mother--” She stops herself. They’re not supposed to talk about that. 

Philip reaches up to cup her breasts and she shivers, tries not to arch into his touch. He is gentle, like she remembers, almost worshipful. Faintly, she hears the black and white cat scratching on the doorframe outside. 

______________________________________________

“I was miserable when I was pregnant with Jared,” Leanne says when they meet in a coffee place close to the apartment during Elizabeth’s second trimester. “Sick all the time, always craving something I couldn’t put my finger on.”

Elizabeth lays a hand across her thickening middle and says, “This one likes chocolate. A lot.”

“Are you sure that’s not just you?” Leanne teases. 

Elizabeth lets out a warm laugh. It’s the first time she has in a while. She can’t remember. 

“Enjoy it now,” Leanne warns her. “Your second one will want something like pickles, I’m sure.”

Elizabeth balks at the thought of a second child, though it has of course crossed her mind that the Centre won’t be satisfied with just one. Surely two will be enough though, won’t it?

“They’re finding us a bigger place once she’s born,” Elizabeth says absently. “A house. A townhouse, maybe, those are popular.”

Leanne reaches across the table and rubs her wrist affectionately. “I wish you could see mine and Emmett’s place. See Jared. Meet the baby.”

“What’s her name?”

“Amelia.”

Elizabeth nods. “That’s pretty. Philip likes Roger for a boy, or Henry.”

“And a girl?”

“I wish I could name her after my mother. I wish they could know each other. I wish... a lot of things.” She looks at the tea leaves stuck in the bottom of her cup and swallows the lump rising in her throat.

“How is Philip?” Leanne asks. Her tone indicates she’s hoping for a more positive answer than Elizabeth had given her last time. 

Elizabeth shrugs. “Helpful.” At Leanne’s raised brow she elaborates, “You know how he is. We’re just different. He--Washington suits him.”

“What suits you?” Leanne asks. 

After a moment she answers, “Serving my country.”

______________________________________________

She teeters precariously on the kitchen stool, balancing on her knees. The salad bowl is just out of reach on the top shelf of the cabinet and if they can get the big stuff in the kitchen packed up today they can worry about the rest after the baby comes. Pieces of their fabricated life sit in cardboard boxes on the counter, on the kitchen table. A woman had come by earlier to help them pick out a bed for the new house, all arranged by the Centre, of course. 

“Why can’t we just keep the bed we have?” Elizabeth had asked, agitated, and not just because it felt like the baby was doing jumping jacks on her bladder. 

“The Centre thought it would be best. New house, new bed. You want to make a good impression in your new neighborhood.”

They’d been out to what was to be their new neighborhood last week. Cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac, houses that all looked the same with shiny cars in the driveways. Mailboxes with fresh coats of paint, lawns groomed to perfection. It was exactly what she’d been told America would be like. She’d thought of the apartment she’d lived in with her mother, of Katya and Ivan and their parents who shared it with them. Of the thin walls and the long nights but the feeling that she was part of something important, something big. Something that would give her mother and all these people a better life. Something that would help her country be the best it could be. 

“What are you doing?” Philip yelps behind her. 

She startles and grips the door of the cabinet, fearing, maybe hoping, for a split second that she will fall. But he’s behind her in an instant with a hand on the small of her back. 

“I’ve got it,” she snaps as he helps her down to the floor. 

“You’re eight months pregnant. You shouldn’t be scaling the countertops, Elizabeth,” Philip admonishes. His brow is furrowed in a way she hasn’t seen before, his eyes sharp and his lip curled. 

“I don’t need you to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing,” she says evenly.

“Let me get it, at least,” Philip sighs. He retrieves the salad bowl from the top shelf of the cabinet, revealing behind it three small cans of cat food. Elizabeth bites her lip and makes a fist so tight she thinks she might draw blood from her own palm. He brings the cans down, turning them over in his hands. 

“I didn’t buy these,” he says, almost defensively. 

“No,” Elizabeth sighs. “I did. Um, I’m feeling tired. I’m going to lie down for a little while.”

In the bedroom she shuts her eyes but hears Philip shuffling around the kitchen, wrapping glassware in newspaper. Around six she hears the can opener, the clink of metal on ceramic, the opening and closing of the front door. The radio clicks on and she closes her eyes, the voices and the static becoming one and lulling her into a restless sleep. 

Around eight thirty he brings her a plate of food, leftovers from the night before. She hopes he knows what she means when she grabs his wrist and whispers, “Thank you.”

______________________________________________

She perches on the edge of Gregory’s couch even though she’s been to his place a dozen times, feels almost more at home here than she does in Washington. Perching isn’t easy this far along. _Maybe you’ll have a Christmas baby,_ her doctor told her last week, while the nurse changed the hand turkey decorations on the door to paper chain wreaths. 

Gregory has a Christmas tree in the corner, small and slouching under the weight of popcorn strands and tinsel. He’d lit a stick of incense to clear the place of the smell of weed when she’d arrived an hour ago. Now it just smells like sandalwood and weed. 

Gregory returns from the kitchen and sits beside her on the couch, pulls her back to rest against his chest. “I’m sorry,” she says. They don’t even sound like words anymore. 

“Stop,” he says, his voice resonating along her back. He brings a hand up to stroke her cheek and she’s embarrassed when she starts crying again. 

“Have you ever wanted something,” she says, wiping her eyes, “even though you know it’s impossible?”

Gregory kisses the top of her head. “I think you know the answer to that.”

She squeezes his arm where it rests across her her belly.

“What do you want, Elizabeth?” he asks. 

“To go home,” she sighs, snuggling into him. “To--to serve in another way. This lie--it was easy when it was just me and Philip. Simpler. But now there’s…” She pushes her hair away from her face. “It’s so much bigger now.”

“You’re the only person I know who can handle anything,” Gregory says. “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, Elizabeth. I mean that. And this lie--it’s part of you. If you weren’t doing this, if you weren’t living this life, what would you do?”

She’s thought of it, of course. She could serve like her mother had. Would she be happy? Is she happy now?

“I don’t want to go back,” she admits, trying to keep her voice steady. 

“You stay here as long as you need, baby,” Gregory says, holding her tighter. 

“Don’t call me baby.”

______________________________________________

_1968_

She closes the door to the bedroom carefully, worried she’ll wake Paige. Her daughter is a light sleeper, sensitive to the tiniest sounds. 

“She’s down?” Philip asks, frozen at the counter in the kitchen. 

Elizabeth nods. “What are you doing?”

He motions to the boxes still lining the counter. “I was going to take a car load over to the new place, but if you think it’ll wake her--”

She waves a hand. “It’s fine.”

Philip nods and stacks a few of the smaller boxes together, then opens the front door. He is nearly swept off balance when the black and white cat comes scurrying in, slipping through the door, barely ajar. The cat scurries under the table, eyes wide, crouched on his haunches. His tail swishes back and forth between the chair legs.

“What’s he doing?” Philip asks after a moment.

Elizabeth squints, leaning down to meet the cat’s eyes. “He’s been trying to get in for over a year,” she says, “and now that he’s here he doesn’t know what to do.” 

“You don’t mind that he’s inside?” Philip asks.

She looks up at him. “You should go, take that stuff to the house. If he wants to leave, he will.”

He nods, and when he comes back an hour and a half later, the cat is still under the table, snaking around Elizabeth’s ankles while she feeds Paige at the table. 

“Hey,” she says quietly, her voice scratchy with fatigue. Paige had only slept an hour or so before waking up wailing and hungry. 

The look Philip gives her is haunting, searching in a way that makes her feel seen and vulnerable, exposed. She pulls Paige closer to her breast and clears her throat, but doesn’t turn away when he brings out the ridiculous camera he’d gotten from Emmett for Christmas. 

______________________________________________

_1984_

“I’m totally responsible enough, and so is Paige!” Henry insists. He grabs the orange juice from the fridge and pours himself a glass.

“Henry, enough,” Paige sighs from the table. “Do you want to go to boarding school or do you want a dog?”

“You guys told her?” Henry turns to his mother in disbelief. 

Elizabeth is caught off guard at the sink. She still feels the weight of the crown on her head, the scent of the warehouse still damp in her nostrils. “What?” she asks her son, blinking. 

“Relax, doofus, they didn’t tell me,” Paige says. “I figured it out for myself. Last I checked you were too busy to take care of a dog.”

“It would be fun, that’s all I’m saying.” Henry shrugs. “We’ve never had any pets, it’s just weird. Everybody has pets.”

Philip pours himself a cup of coffee. “Your mother and I work a lot, you and your sister both have a lot going on with school--”

“We used to have a cat,” Paige chimes in suddenly. 

Elizabeth turns to her daughter. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s that picture of me as a baby. You’re holding me and there’s a cat walking around your feet.”

“Oh, yeah…” Philip smiles and flicks his eyes to Elizabeth over his cup. “That was in the old place, remember?”

“I do.” She bites her tongue to keep from smiling even wider. 

“So can we get a cat then?” Henry asks, throwing an orange in his lunch bag. 

“Come on, Henry,” Paige says, brushing past him to the door. “I’m leaving now, and I’m not gonna be late for school because you weren’t ready.”

He hurries after his sister, gathering his notebooks scattered across the kitchen table. The front door shuts behind them and Elizabeth smiles at Philip. 

“When did they…” She trails off. “I’d forgotten about the cat. When we lived in the city.”

“Yeah.” Philip smiles. “Me too.” He moves past her to refill his coffee cup, stopping a moment to rest a hand on the small of her back. She wants to always feel this permanent, this real, though she knows the illusion will wear off in just a few more hours. She thinks of their rings, locked away downstairs and realizes that it is dangerous to feel this brave. 

“Where’d Paige see that picture?” Elizabeth asks. “We don’t keep it out anywhere.”

Philip shrugs. “Probably in an old photo album somewhere.”

“She knew about Henry. Boarding school. I know I didn’t mention it to her. Did you?” 

He shakes his head. “No.”

She wets her lips. “We have to keep an eye on her.”

“Yeah.” Philip’s voice is hoarse. “I know.”


End file.
